Her mother's murder made her a poet: Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey's career is tinged with tragedy

By Nara Schoenberg

Chicago Tribune|

Nov 06, 2018 | 11:20 AM

Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, is a faculty member at Northwestern University. She examines her mother's murder in her powerful new collection of poems, "Monument." (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune)

Natasha Trethewey should be celebrating; her new book, “Monument: Poems New and Selected,” was longlisted for a prestigious National Book Award. But during an interview at an Evanston restaurant with sparkling glassware and floor-to-ceiling windows, Trethewey repeatedly wiped away tears.

Her new book tackles many topics, but the main focus is the murder of Trethewey’s mother when the poet was 19, a loss that haunts Trethewey to this day.

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“I think of myself as someone who has lived in a state of bereavement my whole adult life,” Trethewey said. “And that’s why the first poem (in the new book) ends, ‘You carry her corpse on your back.’ But it’s nothing I want to put down. You don’t want to put down that grief. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what made me.”

“Monument,” published Tuesday, combines new and previously published poems, some about obscure black soldiers and domestic workers, many rooted in Trethewey’s native Mississippi, where her father, who was white, and her mother, who was black, lived as a married couple before interracial marriage was legal. There’s a poem about a cross burning outside their home, and one about the racist language that Trethewey encountered as a child. All of this is essential to Trethewey’s work, as is the African-American history she repeatedly references.

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“How could I not write about my geography, my Mississippi, my South? How could I not write about the history that one inherits coming from a particular time and place?” said Trethewey, 52, a professor of English at Northwestern University.

“Me being born in Mississippi on the 100th anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day, the child of miscegenation, when my parents’ marriage was still illegal — that’s not a personal history, that’s a national history.”

But in “Monument,” Trethewey shifts the emphasis, using new poems to spotlight her mother’s murder by her second ex-husband, Trethewey’s stepfather, after what Trethewey describes as years of domestic violence.

The first poem in the collection, “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath,” a showstopper in which roiling grief is distilled into jewel-like irony, begins, “Do not hang your head or clench your fists/ when even your friend, after hearing the story,/ says, My mother would never put up with that./ Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,/ more often, a woman who chooses to leave/ is then murdered.”

That poem is a lens through which to view the rest of the collection, Trethewey said. Her mother’s murder, even more than racism, is the wound that made her a poet.

Trethewey, daughter of poet and professor Eric Trethewey and social worker Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, said she wrote her earliest poems in third grade, and even then, she said, she was writing about African-American history: “I can remember writing a poem about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

By high school, she was focused on fiction, and, with the exception of a single poem written in the aftermath of her mother’s death, she didn’t really come back to poetry until graduate school. She had recently started a master’s degree program in fiction at Hollins University when she told a poet friend what a terrible poet she would make.

“No, I don’t believe that. I think you could write a poem,” her friend told her.

She sat down and did, just to prove him wrong. But the poem wasn’t that bad, she said. She put it in her fiction professor Marianne Gingher’s mailbox, and the next time Trethewey saw Gingher, her professor was running down the hall in her direction, saying, “Oh Tasha! You’re a poet!”

Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2007 book, “Native Guard,” and served two terms as the U.S. poet laureate. Her poems are so deeply rooted in the South that it’s hard to imagine her comfortably ensconced in Evanston with her husband, Brett Gadsden, an associate professor of history at Northwestern. But Trethewey said the Chicago area is a good fit for her.

Originally from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, she felt landlocked when her parents divorced, and she and her mother moved to Atlanta. Now she lives three blocks from Lake Michigan and walks its shores every day. Because of the Great Migration, in which African-Americans left the South for Northern cities, she has a family history in Chicago as well. Her mother spent her senior year of high school in Chicago, she said. A great aunt worked here as a lab technician; a great uncle owned a pharmacy.

“It feels sometimes when I’m on the South Side and run into people like ‘Up Mississippi’ — it feels like I’m not far removed from Mississippi,” she said.

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“Monument” springs from a memoir Trethewey is writing about her mother. When writing got painful, Trethewey turned to poetry — the only thing, she said, that gives her any kind of relief from her grief. As time went on, she had 11 poems stemming from the memoir, a set of distinct works that didn’t fit into her ongoing poetry manuscript. She pitched a collection of new and old poems to her editor, and reordered the poems to create a new narrative arc.

The book is framed by two poems, the haunting first piece, “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath,” and “Articulation,” a lyrical kick in the teeth: “And how/ not to recall her many wounds: ring finger/ shattered, her ex-husband’s bullet finding/ her temple, lodging where her last thought lodged?”